Witness: Deputy Made Phony Records

January 16, 1986|By James H. Tolpin, Staff Writer

A Palm Beach County sheriff`s deputy said under oath Wednesday that Sgt. Thomas McGinn, the suspended leader of the sheriff`s K-9 unit, created a set of phony training records for a pending lawsuit and ordered him to sign a graduation certificate for an untrained K-9 team.

Deputy Robert Anderson said McGinn, who is the subject of a state criminal investigation focusing on other dogs, wanted the false set of records to look as if they had been written three years earlier, during a 1981 K-9 training class.

During his deposition Wednesday, Anderson told how McGinn`s plan emerged at a summer 1984 meeting in McGinn`s office at sheriff`s headquarters.

``McGinn said he had a deposition and needed four months worth of training records. He said he needed records for (K-9) Cello,`` Anderson said.

Cello is the now-deceased Delray Beach police dog that bit two youths. Attorneys Marc H. Gold and Barbara Heyer have filed federal civil rights suits against Cello`s handler, Officer Robert Musco, the city of Delray Beach and the Sheriff`s Office, through which Cello was purchased and trained. The suit contends Cello was inadequately trained and his records falsified.

Gold took a deposition from McGinn, who was one of Cello`s trainers at the Sheriff`s Office, on Aug. 8, 1984.

Anderson told Gold on Wednesday that he refused to make out the records for McGinn, but then photocopied blank training records and took them home, where he and his girlfriend wrote in dates for 1981 and a narrative of what drills the K-9 class performed.

The drills appeared authentic because Anderson and his dog actually had been in a K-9 training class in 1981, and he referred to his own record of his own class when starting the false set, Anderson said.

Anderson said he returned the documents to McGinn about 20 minutes later.

``Sometime later, (McGinn) went through and put numbers in and initialed them,`` Anderson said, referring to training scores for Cello.

Those scores, Gold said, show Cello doing exceptional and strenuous work, even on dates when another set of training records -- the original set -- show the dog was disabled with a broken leg.

Gold said he received the phony set of records from McGinn and the real set when he subpoenaed the Sheriff`s Office. Sheriff`s Sgt. Ernest Millner identified the original set during a deposition Monday.

Anderson, who was training dogs and handlers for the Sheriff`s Office, also said McGinn ordered him to sign a K-9 graduation certificate in 1984 for then- Deputy James Sean Patterson and his dog, Alf.

Anderson said he did not sign, and the issue soon became moot. Alf was put to death shortly after Patterson shot him in the eye with a .38-caliber weapon on June 21, 1984, after being bitten during a training session.

The state investigation began Dec. 14, 1984, after the Sun-Sentinel revealed that McGinn submitted phony receipts and inflated purchase prices on dogs he bought while traveling for the Sheriff`s Office in West Germany.